“I’ve gained deeper understanding listening to Rupert Spira than I have from any other exponent of modern spirituality. Reality is sending us a message we desperately need to hear, and at this moment no messenger surpasses Spira and the transformative words in his essays.” —Deepak Chopra, author of You Are the Universe, Spiritual Solutions, and Super Brain Our world culture is founded on the assumption that the Big Bang gave rise to matter, which in time evolved into the world, into which the body was born, inside which a brain appeared, out of which consciousness at some late stage developed. As a result of this “matter model,” most of us believe that consciousness is a property of the body. We feel that it is “I,” this body, that knows or is aware of the world. We believe and feel that the knowing with which we are aware of our experience is located in and shares the limits and destiny of the body. This is the fundamental presumption of mind and matter that underpins almost all our thoughts and feelings and is expressed in our activities and relationships. The Nature of Consciousness suggests that the matter model has outlived its function and is now destroying the very values it once sought to promote. For many people, the debate as to the ultimate reality of the universe is an academic one, far removed from the concerns and demands of everyday life. After all, life happens independently of our models of it. However, The Nature of Consciousness will clearly show that the materialist paradigm is a philosophy of despair and, as such, the root cause of unhappiness in individuals. It is a philosophy of conflict and, as such, the root cause of hostilities between families, communities, and nations. Far from being abstract and philosophical, its implications touch each one of us directly and intimately. An exploration of the nature of consciousness has the power to reveal the peace and happiness that truly lie at the heart of experience. Our experience never ceases to change, but the knowing element in all experience—consciousness, or what we call “I”—itself never changes. The knowing with which all experience is known is always the same knowing. Being the common, unchanging element in all experience, consciousness does not share the qualities of any particular experience: it is not qualified, conditioned, or limited by experience. The knowing with which a feeling of loneliness or sorrow is known is the same knowing with which the thought of a friend, the sight of a sunset, or the taste of ice cream is known. Just as a screen is never disturbed by the action in a movie, so consciousness is never disturbed by experience; thus it is inherently peaceful. The peace that is inherent in us—indeed that is us—is not dependent on the situations or conditions we find ourselves in. In a series of essays that draw you, through your own direct experience, into an exploration of the nature of this knowing element that each of us calls “I,” The Nature of Consciousness posits that consciousness is the fundamental reality of the apparent duality of mind and matter. It shows that the overlooking or ignoring of this reality is the root cause of the existential unhappiness that pervades and motivates most people’s lives, as well as the wider conflicts that exist between communities and nations. Conversely, the book suggests that the recognition of the fundamental reality of consciousness is the first step in the quest for lasting happiness and the foundation for world peace.

This text is an introduction to consciousness which aims to impose structure on the relating philosophical literature. There are sections covering stream of consciousness, theoretical issues, function of consciousness, subjectivity and the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument and qualia.

Book Description: Few books about consciousness get to the nitty gritty as quickly as this one. By the end of the preface, the essence of the novel hypothesis that is at the heart of the book is clear. The reader is then taken on a stimulating intellectual journey that ranges from ancient Hindu religious texts to the most up-to-the minute papers in the neuroscience literature as the author supports and defends the hypothesis. If you have any interest at all in the academic field of consciousness studies, don't miss this book!

Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, implicit awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal, or what-it-is-like, dimension of conscious experience, defending the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character, including qualia theories, according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations, and representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content. (Series A)

In recent years science and philosophy have seen a resurgence of open-mindedness toward deeper views of consciousness. This book explores ideas and evidence now changing the way scientists and philosophers approach the place of consciousness in the universe. From the frontiers of modern physics and cosmology to controversial experiments exploring telepathy and mind-matter interaction, the emerging view promises to change how we understand our place in the universe, our relationship to other life, and the nature of reality itself.

The Physical Nature of Consciousness contains twelve chapters that discuss recent and new perspectives on the relation between modern physics and consciousness. Stuart Hameroff opens with an extended and updated exposition of the Penrose/Hameroff Orch-OR model, and subsequently addresses recent criticisms of quantum approaches to the brain. Evan Walker presents his view on consciousness from the perspective of a new approach to the integration of quantum theory and relativity. Friedrich Beck elaborates on the Beck/Eccles quantum approach to consciousness. Karl Pribram puts the holographic view on consciousness in perspective of his life long work. Peter Marcer and Edgar Mitchell explain the relevance of quantum holography for consciousness. Gordon Globus discusses the relation between postmodern philosophical theories and quantum consciousness. Chris Clarke develops a theory in terms of a specific type of formal logic to reconcile the phenomenology of consciousness with the physical world. Ilya Prigogine summarizes his view on complexity, and on the future of quantum theory, which goes beyond the present formalism, and goes on to comment on the problem of consciousness. Matti Pitkanen identifies the place for consciousness in a unifying topological geometro-dynamics theory. Colin McGinn argues against classical materialism. Dick Bierman gives an overview of anomalous phenomena. He identifies a decline effect, and discusses different possible interpretations. Philip Van Loocke closes the volume with a discussion on how deep teleology in cellular systems may relate to consciousness. (Series A)

This book pursues an inquiry into consciousness that ranges from ancient Greece to empirical neuropsychology to the experiential traditions of introspection and meditation. Harry Hunt begins by reviewing the renewed interest in ordinary consciousness and in altered and transpersonal states of consciousness. He then presents competing views of consciousness in cognition, neurophysiology, and animal psychology, developing a view of perceptual awareness as the core of consciousness potentially shared across species. Hunt next brings together the separate strands of neo-realist approaches to perception and thought, the phenomenology of imagery and synesthesia, and cognitive theories of metaphor. He develops an original cognitive theory of mystical experience that combines Buddhist meditative descriptions of consciousness and Heidegger's sense of Being. In relating both of these to James J. Gibson's views on perception, he avoids the various "new age" supernaturalisms that so often blight the transpersonal literature. Other themes include the relation between consciousness and time; the common perceptual-metaphoric rooting of parallels between consciousness and modern physics; and the communal basis of transpersonal states as reflected in a sociology of mysticism and a reinterpretation of parapsychological research.

The next great revolution in science will undoubtedly be the emergence of a useful theory of consciousness--a theory based on our better understanding of molecules and brains and of the nature of science itself. Evolving the Mind broaches both of these themes, covering how ideas about the mind evolved in science and how the mind itself evolved in Nature. What Cairns-Smith does that is particularly compelling is to synthesize the contributions of a wide range of scientific disciplines (physics, molecular biology, brain science, and evolution) to bring science to the brink of a unified theory of consciousness. The author thoroughly explores this complex concept in a straightforward, conversational style. Few readers will be able to resist the exciting conclusion that we are closing in on a scientific theory of consciousness.

Consciousness is a natural phenomenon. We know that it happens, and it happens in our natural world.Many phenomena over time have been seen as magical and supernatural. Inevitably, orderly Nature has been discovered to be the source of them all. Much as with life itself in earlier times, this book proposes that consciousness is simply the latest "magical" mystery and is not supernatural or foreign to our ways of scientific understanding, but natural, and resulting from laws and facts of physics. As with life itself, these laws and facts are probably similar to and connected to the laws and facts that we know already. We propose and expect that we can theorize about the nature of consciousness with some specificity, and in this book, we do just that.